It wasn’t particularly good to see her again. She looked much the same. Her face had a pinched, appraising look I most often associated with toddlers. “What do you want?”
We had approximately thirty seconds more before her baby brother arrived with the cavalry. The battering sound at the door had finally stopped. There was no use worrying about August—what was done was done, and anyway, I’d seen that he carried a knife in his boot.
I hoisted Watson up; his legs were beginning to go, and with an effort, he managed to straighten them. His eyelashes were fluttering. “Where is it?” I asked Phillipa.
“Where is what, exactly?”
With my other hand, I clicked the safety off my gun. “Twenty seconds. Where is the auction being held, and at what time?”
Because the halls I’d dragged Watson down, on this floor and the one below it, were filled with paintings. Paintings with quite a lot of black paint, and sad-looking young Edwardians looking at glass scarabs and their hands and microscopes and each other. This was a storage facility, but she was pleased with her wares and proud of herself, her crown jewels, these forged Hans Langenberg paintings, and what is a Moriarty if not someone who gilds their abattoir?
(Watson, when you read this, I do hope you appreciate my restraint in reserving this information until now.)
Of course they would be sold to buyers through her private network; the question was only when.
“January,” she said. “The twenty-seventh. It’s a pity that you aren’t dead, Charlotte.”
“Yes, well, we all have our crosses to bear,” I said. “January is too late. You’ll have one sooner.”
“When?” She spat the word.
“Tomorrow.”
“Why on earth should I do that?”
“Because I’ll expose you. Because I’ll send every last bit of information I’ve gathered on your operations to the government. Because, if you don’t, I will have my brother hit this warehouse twenty minutes from now in a precision strike that he’ll write off as a training exercise, and then, for good measure, I’ll do your house. Because I’m holding a gun, you cow, and I am perfectly capable of making your death look like a suicide.”
In that moment, I wasn’t entirely sure I was bluffing.
“Fine,” she said at length. “Where?”
I took a few steps forward. The office had concrete floors, and Watson’s shoes skittered along them. “At your auction site in Prague. You still use that museum after hours? Give me the address.”
She hesitated. My time was up. I could hear the feet pounding up the stairs.
Very, very carefully (as one must be in these situations), I shot out the panel of glass above her head. She screeched.
“Phillipa!” someone called below.
“You will in fact give me the address, or I’ll have all of your assets frozen by the morning.” I thought for a moment. “And your new orchid gardener sent on permanent vacation.”
“Without your brother, you’d be toothless,” she said.
“Accurate. Unfortunately for you, he’s very much alive. The address. Now.”
She gave it to me: it was in Prague, in Old Town, and I committed it to memory. The footsteps in the hall now. Watson moaned, low in his throat. Under his weight, I’d lost all feeling in my left shoulder.
“Return our phones,” I said. She placed them on the table; I caught them both up in a hand. “Thanks. You’ve been a great help.”
“Don’t you want to know what’s happened to your uncle?” she said to me. “Don’t you care at all?”
I knew what had happened to Leander. I hadn’t wanted to believe it. I had insisted to myself that I needed to find firm evidence. But the truth of it was I had known, bodily known—not known with my brain, and so perhaps not legitimately—but my heart had been saying it since the day we’d left Sussex. My heart! The absurdity of it.
I knew, too, that there was nothing I could do to rescue him until I could tie Lucien Moriarty to the crime. Whether or not he was guilty was beside the point.
The alternative was unthinkable.
“Tell anyone I know about this auction, tell anyone I’m coming, and I’ll have you killed. No,” I said, as Watson coughed, “I’ll do it myself.”
The door flung open behind me.
“Charlotte,” August said cautiously, as the men behind him raised their guns. They both had Greystone haircuts—military, with better sideburns. Milo appreciated aesthetics.
I relaxed marginally.
“August,” I said, as it’s polite to greet one’s friends.
“Charlotte. There’s a girl on the roof. She says her name is Lena.” He cleared his throat. “She says she brought the helicopter you wanted?”
eleven
IN THE BACK OF HADRIAN MORIARTY’S CAR, I HAD TEXTED Watson some suggestions about fleeing. In the process, I’d also discovered a number of texts from my Sherringford roommate, Lena, informing me that she had decided to do some last-minute Christmas shopping in “a European city” and had chosen Berlin (“Though, ew, Char, do they even have a Barneys?”) because she was tired of “you and Jamie dodging me. Is it because he’s still mad at Tom?”
Tom and Lena, our Sherringford roommates, were dating. And no, Watson was not still angry at Tom, even though the little charmless frog had spied on him throughout last semester in exchange for cash. Tom had believed—erroneously—that his girlfriend, the daughter of an oil tycoon, would dump him if he didn’t have the means to impress her with presents and trips and the like.
Things Lena Gupta was impressed by, in my experience with her: high-fashion jackets covered in snaps, spikes, and other metal hardware; unstudied eccentricity; things that exploded; boys who were willing to hold her bag. Things Lena had zero interest in: other people’s financial backgrounds. Lena was the kind of girl that let me draw her blood for an experiment without asking a single question. Lena never asked very many questions at all. This quality, among others, made her an excellent friend.
When, outside the Moriartys’ warehouse, I sent both her and my brother messages saying I might need medical assistance, Milo didn’t immediately respond. Lena did. She wrote back “ok!” and a number of those smiling faces with hearts for eyes. As Watson was being pummeled, I took the few seconds needed to send her our location before I joined into the fray myself.
Lena arrived with a medevac helicopter, two nurses, a pilot, and a bug-eyed Tom with headphones on. Around her shoulders was a faux fur stole. It was beautiful. I was very happy to see her.
“We should live together again next year,” I told her as we helped Watson into the cabin. August climbed in next to the pilot.
“Totally,” she yelled back over the noise. “Do you think we could get a room in Carter Hall? They have private bathrooms!”
Watson was laid out on a stretcher, and though he was clearly conscious, he didn’t try to speak. His jaw was swollen to the size of a grapefruit. Instead, he motioned for me to give him his phone.
Emails, he wrote, with difficulty.
“From Leander to your father? Are they on your phone?”
Yes. Read them.
I took his phone. The two nurses shooed me away. They put in IVs, shone penlights into his eyes. Tom looked over at Watson’s battered face, and then buried his own face in his hands. Empathy? Delayed guilt? I raised him a quarter of a notch in my estimation.
I directed the copter to return to Greystone. There was a helipad on the roof and doctors inside the building. I wanted to avoid police involvement as much as possible, and taking Watson to a hospital in this state would certainly raise some red flags.
They would take him down to the medical bay. August would run alongside to help them through the security checkpoints. Before they left, I told the nurses to check for internal bleeding, a reminder I’m sure they appreciated.
“You’re not coming?” August asked.
“No,” I said. “I need three cigarettes and fifty minutes in silence. I can’t have a cigarette in a hospital room, and anyway I can’t think when he looks like that.”
“It might be a comfort to him,” he said. They were loading Watson onto a gurney.